U.S. Seeks IP Protection, Exports in China Talks – Bloomberg – Annual U.S.-Chinese trade talks opened today, with American officials aiming for China to take concrete action to protect intellectual property rights and buy more U.S. products.
The 22nd U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade opened in the central Chinese city of Chengdu as the U.S. pushed in recent weeks for China to change its economic policies, with President Barack Obama saying it must meet international standards if it wants to compete in the global marketplace.

Graff Diamonds Will Use Proceeds From Planned IPO to Open Stores in Asia – Bloomberg – Graff needs to do a better job of understanding Chinese consumers. US store refused entry to a very rich Chinese friend because he was dressed inappropriately. Guard would not let him in and then told him he could not loiter at the door. He was picking up something for his wife, he called her, she called the salesperson, obsequiousness and apologies ensued.

Bush-Era Iraq Hawks Counsel GOP Hopefuls – Bloomberg– neocon losers are back w more bad counsel. intellectual cockroaches//Perry’s list of informal advisers includes Feith; Bolton; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and later ambassador to Afghanistan; and Daniel Blumenthal, former Pentagon international security affairs director for China and Taiwan, according to a person familiar with the campaign who asked not to be named.

China: US Begins ‘Pacific Century’, Online Nationalism Follows · Global Voices– Most of China’s popular blog portal sites have sections for military news, often buried below panels for entertainment and love/relationship stories. Starting roughly in October with the quiet story that India continues to build up its presence along the border with China, posts on military topics seem to have grown in number and prominence on major blog hosting sites, reaching a peak this past week with reactions to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US President Barack Obama’s Pacific swing, which wrapped up in Indonesia on Saturday.Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao insists that China is a good neighbor, but much of what’s been written in many recent blog posts and comment threads sort of suggests otherwise.

Amazon.com: The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends that will Disrupt the World (9781118172063): Shaun Rein: Books – An exposé on how the rise of China will affect the American way of life
The End of Cheap China is a fun, riveting, must-read book not only for people doing business in China but for anyone interested in understanding the forces that are changing the world.
Many Americans know China for manufacturing cheap products, thanks largely to the country’s vast supply of low-cost workers. But China is changing, and the glut of cheap labor that has made everyday low prices possible is drying up as Chinese seek not to make iPhones, but to buy them. Shaun Rein, Founder of the China Market Research Group, puts China’s continuing transformation from producer to large-scale consumer – a process that is farther along than most economists think – under the microscope, examining eight megatrends that are catalyzing change in China and posing threats to Americans’ consumption-driven way of life.Rein takes an engaging and informative approach to examining the extraordinary changes taking place across all levels of Chinese society, talking to everyone from Chinese billionaires and senior government officials to poor migrant workers and even prostitutes and drawing on personal stories and experiences from living in China since the 1990s as well as hard economic data. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of China’s transformation, from fast-improving Chinese companies to confident, optimistic Chinese women to the role of China’s government, and at the end breaks down key lessons for readers to take away.

www.nsc.liu.se/~nixon/sshprobes.html– Some observations on the Great Firewall of China.//My hypothesis is that just over a year ago, a new function in the firewall went into limited beta test, where a sample of outgoing ssh connections from China is carefully selected for secondary screening.I don’t know what the selection criteria are, but apparently the probing only involves certain Chinese source networks (hence the lack of probes in connection to brute-force attacks) and certain target hosts.

For the selected ssh connections, the target system is probed from one or two IP addresses under the control of the Chinese government. These may be otherwise innocent addresses that are spoofed at the level of the great firewall, or they may be actual computers under remote control by the government – I have no way to tell.

I don’t know what the probes are supposed to accomplish. My only guess is that the government is looking for certain services it doesn’t approve of, like open proxies or Tor relays, and that precise fingerprinting may be too expensive. Instead, they resort to an inspection method similar to fuzzing, where pseudo-random data is thrown at the server, just to see what happens.

In some cases, the legitimate ssh connections are unsuccessful; they appear to be interrupted. This may be a result of the firewall deciding the target system to be unsuitable and injecting RST packets into the TCP stream to kill it.

The last few weeks, the frequency of the probing has increased. This might mean the beta test period is nearing its end, and that this function is about to become more widely deployed.

Any attempt to interfere in South China Sea disputes will undermine regional peace, stability– BEIJING, Nov. 19 (Xinhua) — The recent high-profile U.S. “strategic” return to Asia and attempts to interfere in territorial disputes in the South China Sea have overshadowed the East Asia summit.It is known to all that South China Sea disputes are a bilateral issue between China and some relevant countries in the region.However, the U.S. failed to show due respect for China’s position on the issue and insisted on bringing the controversial topic to the 10+8 summit for discussion “in general terms.”

U.S. To Transfer Upgraded F-16s to Indonesia – Defense News– can’t US more than make up for lack of F-16 sales to Taiwan with sales to Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam?//The White House issued a statement Nov. 18 saying that it will transfer more than two dozen surplus F-16 Fighting Falcon jet fighters to Indonesia.”The Government of Indonesia has chosen to improve its internal air defense capability through the upgrade and regeneration of Excess Defense Articles (EDA) USAF F-16 Block 25 aircraft provided to the Government of Indonesia via a grant approved in August 2011,” the statement reads.

Information Dissemination: New Chinese ASW aircraft – The long rumoured ASW aircraft has finally been revealed. In recent photos from an airport (my guess in Shaanxi AC), we see Y-8 ASW aircraft (dubbed HIgh New 6) amongst them. Here are some of its photos.

Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis – James Fallows – National – The Atlantic– I can’t see any legitimate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it coming from some riot-control unit in China, or in Syria. The calm of the officer who walks up and in a leisurely way pepper-sprays unarmed and passive people right in the face? We’d think: this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population. That’s what I think here.Less than two months ago, it seemed shocking when one NYPD officer cavalierly walked up to a group of female protestors and pepper-sprayed them in the eyes. The UC Davis pepper-sprayer doesn’t slink away, as his NYPD counterpart did, but in every other way this is more coldly brutal. And by the way, when did we accept the idea that local police forces would always dress up in riot gear that used to be associated with storm troopers and dystopian sci-fi movies?